The Evil WithinReview

After my 23.5 hours with The Evil Within on its standard Survival mode, I was informed I had been eaten alive, had my head shattered, and my torso sliced into thirds a whopping 218 times. This wickedly creative, tense, and yes, tough game does not suffer fools gladly, yet I was compelled to return to it after the screen bled to red every time. That, I believe, is the definition of a great survival horror experience.

The Evil Within is aesthetically, functionally, and spiritually in step with director Shinji Mikami’s last foray into the genre, the iconic Resident Evil 4. It’s not simply a rehash of that game, though, as Mikami and his new development studio Tango Gameworks have delivered a harder, bleaker game this time around.

Not that the plot is a strikingly original work for the horror genre. The Evil Within is an investigation of what appears to be a multiple homicide at Beacon Mental Hospital in its fictional Krimson City, before you realize things are not as they seem (an understatement). While its central mystery starts off as compelling, it gradually veers off course, and eventually buckles under the weight of its own unfocused ambition. I found its ending in particular, complete with an unnecessary boss battle apparently inserted only to serve the story, disappointing.

In part, this narrative wrapper is undermined by the rather lifeless player character, Detective Sebastian Castellanos, who is emotionless and cool to the point of parody. Sebastian still quips mundanities like “what is going on here?” after hours of facing the kind of monsters that would drive the average person into a jabbering wreck. It’s hard to care about the stakes when it appears that he doesn’t, even if his calm detachment - “I must be losing it!” - is on occasion darkly comic.

While far from subtle - this is about as excessive as a horror game gets - Tango has created some incredibly strange and wonderful places in The Evil Within’s 15 chapters. Even the usual horror cliches have been twisted and contorted in imaginative ways; meat lockers, clanging industrial interiors, and mannequins have been granted new and ghastly life.

Zooming in, these places are small and linear level designs, yet with the aid of excellent lighting, they become claustrophobic and labyrinthian. Despite a little roughness around the edges - I noticed texture pop-up and clipping issues in the PS4 and Xbox One versions - the game has been beautifully designed.

Tango has employed a keen eye for composition in The Evil Within, and interiors are grimy, full of looming shadows, ornate architecture, and ominous escape routes. They create a terrifying mood of expectation. Once or twice I found myself ducking to avoid an attacker that was revealed to be my own (harmless) shadow, or running from an unseen enemy only to realize nobody was chasing me bar the groans of some distant foe.

Otherwise, the threat here is very real. Enemies that pepper these places are plentiful, unpredictable, and smart. Initially evoking Resident Evil 4’s shambling ganados, they get weirder as The Evil WIthin progresses; not quite The Infected, more The Perverted; designed with an eye toward childhood nightmares and heavily inspired by Japanese horror movies. I wouldn’t be surprised to see some of these foes - in particular, the unforgettable Keeper boss - come to define The Evil Within as time moves on, cosplayed for years and endlessly re-imagined in fan art.

It is The Evil Within’s most unnerving juxtaposition that combat with these terrors is so grounded in reality. You are given only a modest but well-balanced arsenal - the usual pistol, shotgun, sniper rifle, grenade and crossbow combo - with which to fight, as well as basic melee. And while the crossbow caters to a variety of special attacks (freeze, electrocute, harpoon, etc) and shooting is as satisfyingly crunchy as you would expect from Mikami, you have little ammo, first aid, or even stamina at your disposal. Cruelly, for a game where I spent a lot of time running away, Sebastian runs out of puff very quickly. Checkpoints are scarce, so the stakes in this hostile world are high, making for exhilarating experiences regardless of whether you decide to flee or fight as these creatures run - screaming - towards you.

The Evil Within does cater somewhat to those who wish to choose the stealth route, although the AI feels unfairly tuned in on you. You can lay traps or distract enemies by throwing bottles and sneak up behind them for a stealth kill, but more often than not they’ll turn around at the last second, or will have already spotted you several seconds ago. Playing stealthily works in fits and starts, but I did not find it the most accessible gameplay style to adopt.

Of course, you’re not completely powerless. One of The Evil Within’s most enjoyable mechanics is its simple upgrade system. ‘Green gel’ is the limited resource that you use to improve your abilities, weapons, stock and crossbow bolts while in safe houses, and it’s dispersed throughout the world like hidden gold, becoming your most sought after resource. While cashing in this gel makes for strong dilemmas of choice - do you upgrade your shotgun damage, or do you want to be able to run for longer? - I liked how it let me shape my own gameplay style and gave me a brief, if generally illusory, sense of control of the situation.

Such pockets of calm are welcome because it's chaos, not control, that is the point of The Evil Within. The pacing of the action and horror propels you forward at breakneck speed, moving from one climactic encounter to the next with little to no reprieve. Throughout my playthrough, I always felt on the backfoot, and the times when I was really on the backfoot - I’m talking six in the sniper rifle chamber facing a close-combat boss, here - produced some of the most incredible moments I’ve experienced in any video game for years. It had me sweaty-palmed, heart in my throat, for most of its duration.

PC Version - October 16, 2014

The PC port of The Evil Within plays much the same as the console versions, and as such is locked into a cinematic 2:35:1 aspect ratio. That's a bit of an issue - I played on a small 22-inch monitor, and the thick black letterbox bars at the top and bottom of the screen eventually did impede my enjoyment of The Evil Within by simply not allowing me to see enough of it. This was a problem I did not experience at all playing on my 40-inch TV screen, and it's something to take into consideration when deciding which version to pick up, depending on your home set-up.

Another thing to be aware of is that The Evil Within on PC is locked at 30fps by default. Video options in the menu are slim, but you can change this to 60fps via (unsupported) debug console commands. Running at the latter framerate, I did notice stuttering when moving the camera around swiftly from left to right – not ideal when in the midst of a breathless firefight. All things considered, I preferred it at a steady 30fps.

The video options in The Evil Within are slim.

One other little criticism: the mouse controls in the menu screen lag significantly, although performed fine for me in-game.

Ultimately, the experience I had on PC is pretty much the same as you’ll get playing on console, which might disappointment high-end PC users. Although I experienced no crashes while running it on an Intel Core i7-3770 CPU and Nvidia GeForce GTX680, that’s about as high as my praise goes for this port on a technical level.

The Evil Within is a brutal, challenging, and remarkably fun game. Its eerie world and imaginative enemies are genuinely frightening, and the scares are heightened significantly by the scarcity of resources at your disposal. It keeps the odds stacked against you to the point that they often feel insurmountable, yet it’s finely tuned to ensure that they never really are, as long as you can keep a cool head and a steady aim in the face of building panic. While its story ends up buckling under its own ambition, there is little here that takes away from the joy of experiencing survival horror under the steady hand of a master of the craft.